Psychology PhD student awarded cybercrime internship
Nikolaos Theodoropoulus is spending 3 months working with Scottish Government researchers on cybercrime
Congratulations to psychology PhD student Nikolaos Theodoropoulus who started a 3-month full-time placement in the Scottish Government in May 2019.
He is working with statisticians, social researchers and economists in the Justice Analytical Services Division to analyse Scottish cyber-crime data and identify commonalities between offenders. These results could potentially be used to inform and update relevant policies.
Cybercrime is one of the youngest types of crimes as it only became feasible with the expansion of the internet. Because of this, this project is fully exploratory and the first of its kind in the Scottish Government.
Using statistics to make informed inferences
Nik’s PhD, supervised by Dr Adam Moore, Dr Chris Lucas (School of Informatics) and Dr Nadia Gamboz (UNISOB Napoli University), focuses on using existing data to assess links between morality and cognitive dissonance.
One of the aims of the PhD is to examine how political agents strategically disengage from some of their moral values while upholding others as a means to resolve any potential dissonance they might experience when having conflicting beliefs (i.e., people who on the one hand are against abortion but on the other hand in favour of life sentence).
Findings will contribute to understanding the nature of the morality of political agents. This understanding could be used to decrease the gap between different political and ideological parties such as liberals and conservatives.
Shaping policy through research
The placement will allow Nik to understand how research informs policy change in the Scottish Government.
I am very excited about this internship as it will give me a glimpse of what working outside of academia is really like. Equally exciting is the fact that the end-result of this placement might have a real-life impact on informing and updating relevant policies
The Scottish Graduate School of Social Science internships are awarded via a competitive process open to all 2nd and 3rd-year social science PhD students across Scotland. The call for the next round of internships closes 17 June 2019.